Quil Erikson
TL;DR Background Quil Erikson is a 1/4 Elf, 3/4 Human Bard affiliated with the Bard's College of Lore. He is a mute so he casts magic using musical instruments or more mainly, hand tutting. He is designed and and performed by Chase C. Being a bookworm all his life, he abhors violence and doesn't have the stomach for it. As a result, his magic is mainly knowledge gathering and unconventional communication. "Knowledge is Power" is his personal mantra. While magic is his main passion, lore always comes a close second. He's always pursuing new stories to learn and share with others because he's a heavy believer of the saying, "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it." While Quil abhors violence, the party he is currently in constantly forces his hand in challenging that belief. He is learning to find the balance in justified violence in the name of defense, and thoughtless violence. Early Life Quil is 1/4 Elf, his father being a human and mother a half elf. He lived on a very remote farm, removed from much of society. As a result, his first time seeing the big city, he immediately fell in love with the diversity he saw there. From then and on, he's always had his head in the clouds and buried under books. As a result he was a bad farmhand at his father's farm. His mother didn't help keep him grounded, telling him many stories of her immortal elvish family and heritage and gifting many elvish books. His father wanted him to be a decorated warrior, built for war and defending his idea of a patriotic nation. After a certain age, Quil's parents noticed their son was unusually quiet. After some prodding, they discovered he was mute. A life removed from society didn't motivate him to talk a lot, so he didn't feel a need to say much, or at all. To try to fix this, his parents brought Quil on a couple days' journey to the big city, and made a beeline for the city's best storytellers - the Bard's College of Lore. After some imploring the college finally agreed to take him in and teach the art of storytelling. The bard college tried to get him to talk, but to no success. In the meantime they put him to work learning lore just as much as any normal bard student would. Bardic magic, being part of the curriculum, was not accessible to him except for in theory since he couldn't say the necessary spell words. It fascinated him. Discovery Something about the magic aspect clicked with Quil and it was pretty much all he studied in his spare time. He had a vague sense of something, but it wasn't till a good year later that a light bulb lit up in his head. He had a theory that the spell words had specific patterns of vibrations to them. It was common knowledge that magic, as a basis, poured energy through a medium. For bards, words gave it shape and function. But the formulas he crafted required he break it down one more level deeper, dissecting the structure of the words themselves. Violins are the closest thing to a human voice, so he used that as his medium to test the theory. And it worked. Channeling energy through the violin strings and concentrating so hard he sweated made the strings glow faintly blue where the bow ran over it. He could project simple energy like this. With days of constant finessing, altering formulas, and concentration, he managed to successfully cast Prestidigitation. Despite his success, there was something squirming inside him that his work was not done. He had broken it down into the most basic components, but he had a vague feeling there was one more level deeper to break down. For bards, magic comes from the heart and the soul, the very core of one's being. They created their own power. Bards poured the magic through their songs, but Quil only had a weak imitation of that through a violin. That's when it hit him - he poured the magic through the violin without realizing what he was doing on that level. This wasn't something he could deconstruct mathematically, it was a feeling. A force of nature. He put the violin away and tried to consciously channel the magic through an instrument of his own making- his hands. Holding up two fingers, thinking of the vibrating strings of a violin, and thinking of how the bow vibrates- the feeling of the energy traveling from the core of my being, to his hands, to the imaginary strings... He opened his eyes and saw a faint wisp of a glowing blue line between two fingers. This glowing blue line vibrated ever so slightly. That's when elation hit that he succeeded in creating his own way of expressing bardic magic! Instead of using a violin bow, a wisp of willpower was enough to make it vibrate, but that wasn't enough to do anything. Slowly and carefully shaping the glowing string through series of hand gestures and imitating the forumulas, he succeeded in casting Prestidigitation without a violin. Development A year and a half of diving deep in pure theory and experimentation and trial and error, removed from everyone at the college and strenuously developing this new medium of casting, I create a little rough manuscript detailing my methods, formulas, and figures of series of mostly geometric hand shapes and the spells they correspond with. I'm excited to be a published author someday, but I knew it wasn't perfect just yet. The people who ran the college were all elders, comfortable in their old stories and notorious perfectionists. So I keep this discovery a secret from the college until I can perfect it. This would mean several years before I could present my discovery. Communication always being an issue for me, most of the spells I developed naturally were communication-based. Since I was keeping my discovery secret, I couldn't practice on people so I ended up experimenting on animals and literature. Some of my better developed spells were tailored to protect my woodland friends (Speak with Animals, Cure Wounds). As a result, my rapport with the woodland creatures were very tight, and all the books I checked out were foreign (Comprehend Languages). Later Life As I got older, I was notorious for my book-smarts. I got conscripted into the local police force as an investigator and nobody could figure out why I was so successful at my job. The secret was my rapport with the local fauna- a lot of them were witnesses. A couple years into an unchallenging job, I got bored fast. I took out my old violin and started playing with casting magic with it. It stirred memories of my magical discovery and victory over my personal adversity. At this point I determined my manuscript was finally at a point where it was presentable. I could perform all the spells in there with ease, knowing them by rote. Excited With this newfound resolve, I make a beeline back to the Bard's College where I lived most of my life and called a meeting of the elders to lay bare all of my discoveries, both manuscript and artifact. The elders, surprised at my discoveries, accuse me of withholding knowledge and confiscate my manuscript and artifact and banished me from their college. Banishment One year later, I learn the elders of the college took credit for my discoveries and published a book- The Divine Geometries of Magic. I return to fight the college for justice, and didn't succeed. Betrayed, I left the city to contemplate my next step. Eventually I realized I didn't need a college's validation. I was a bona fide bard. I had a new resolve to further perfect my methods and advance it to the point where they wouldn't be able to replicate the results without my help. That'd prove my credibility. I started thinking of the bards I grew up with, how they were adventurers. My mind immediately went to several urban legends I read about before. I picked one, a legend of a lost artifact rumored to be in Red Larch. After a very challenging series of investigations, I was unsuccessful in tracking down this artifact. I went to the Swinging Sword pub in Red Larch to drown my sorrows in booze when...